THE STRENUOUS MOLE

We read in the books of the astounding strength and energy of this creature that “swims in the earth,” as they say, just as a diving auk, guillemot, or puffin does in the water. The energy of a squirrel that runs up a very tall tree-trunk, darts along a far-reaching horizontal branch, flings himself from the end of it to the branch of another tree, and is a hundred feet high and away before you can finish speaking a sentence of twenty words, is nothing to compare with the feats of the mole underground. But, being out of sight, he is out of mind, on which account his most remarkable qualities are not properly appreciated. He is also a small beast--no bigger than a lady’s gloved hand--consequently his strength, like that of the beetle, does not matter to us. It would matter a great deal if moles grew to the size of cows and bulls. In or under London they would excavate numberless tunnels which would serve as subways for the foot-passengers and for the tubular railways. This would be an advantage, but as a set-off they would, in throwing up their hills, cause a considerable amount of damage. A mole of that size would easily overturn the Royal Exchange, and even Westminster Palace would be tumbled down, burying our congregated law-givers in its ruins.

The life of the mole is an amazingly strenuous one; his appetite surpasses that of any other creature of land or sea, and he does not “eat to burstness” only because his digestion is just as powerful and rapid in its action as his digging muscles. He feeds like a Gargantua, and having dug out and devoured his dinner, he digs again to where a spring exists, and refreshes himself with copious draughts of cold water.

The West Country field labourer, who gets through his two or three gallons of cider at a sitting, is a poor drinker in comparison. After digging and eating and drinking, he goes to sleep, and so soundly does he sleep that you could not wake him by beating drums and firing guns off over his head. Out of this condition he comes very suddenly, like a giant refreshed, and goes furiously to work again at his digging.

If by chance you catch a mole above ground and seize him with your hand you find him a difficult creature to hold. The prickly hedgehog and slippery snake or eel are more easy to manage. You are puzzled by finding that you cannot keep your grip on him, and, if you are a novice, he will probably slip back through his skin until his head is in your hand, and then, when half-a-dozen of his needle-like teeth are deep in your flesh, you will be glad to drop him.

He is not, when caught, a submissive creature, nor has he a friendly or social disposition: in the rutting season the moles have the most savage battles; the floors and walls of the tunnels are washed with blood, and he that falls is worried to death, and his corpse devoured by the victor.

But the mole is seldom seen out of doors, so to speak, taking his walks abroad; when he is striking out in shallow runs in hot pursuit of earthworms and throwing up little hills at short intervals you can often see him when he comes to the surface; he just shows you his back for a few moments; then, having pushed up the loose soil, sinks below again. Now it once happened that a mole showing himself, or his back, to me in this way, taught me something about the creature which I did not know, not having found it in the books. It was on a bright March morning, and I was seated on a stump in a beech wood near the village of Ockley, in Surrey. The ground all about me was covered with a deep carpet of dead leaves, glowing gold and red and russet in the sunlight, when presently, attracted by a rustling among the leaves, I saw that they were being thrust up by some creature under them. It was not the small animal I was listening and watching for just then--the shrew who comes out to sun himself--but a mole throwing up a hill at that spot within a yard of my foot. By and by his velvety-black back became visible, and made in its setting of red and yellow leaves a prettily coloured picture. Presently he disappeared, then quickly rose again with more earth; but the leaves evidently annoyed him, and to rid himself of them he suddenly began agitating his body in an astonishing way, for while the movement lasted he looked like a black ball spinning round so rapidly as to give it the misty appearance of a revolving wheel or the wings of a hovering hawk-moth. This swift motion on his part set the leaves flying, and mole and dust and dancing leaves together formed a little whirlwind or maelstrom. When it was over the leaves settled again on the mound, and twice again the extraordinary performance was repeated, and the little animal being then almost above the ground I foolishly put out my hand to pick him up, and before I could properly grasp him he was gone.

The spinning or revolving motion was an illusion of the sight produced by the exceedingly rapid motions of the skin while the animal was stationary, and the deluding motions were effected by means of what the anatomists call the “twitching muscle,” which is possessed in some degree by most, if not by all, mammalians. We see it every day in our domestic animals, especially in the dog when he shakes himself after a swim; and if he has shaggy hair and it is full of water he throws it off so violently that it fills the air with a dense spray for several feet around him. He could not do this by merely shaking or rocking his whole body from side to side; he does rock his body too, but at the same time he gives the rapid vibratory motion to the whole skin which discharges the wet. So it is with the horse when he shakes off the wet or the dust after rolling.

But in the horse the twitching power does not extend, or is not uniformly powerful, over the whole surface; it is feeble on the hind quarters, and we can only suppose that in the horse, and other large mammalians, the chief use of the twitching act is to shake off dust, flies, and other tormenting insects, and that the growth of the hairy tail in the horse, used to switch insects off, has made the twitching power less useful on this portion of the body. In other words, when this highly specialised tail had fully taken this office or function on itself it caused the decay of the twitching muscle through disuse in those parts of his body.

We see, too, that the muscle has its greatest power in that part of the body which is just out of reach of the tail, and is also more difficult for the animal to reach with his mouth--that is to say, his back over the shoulders. A man riding bare-back can feel it powerfully when the horse shakes himself. “It is like riding on an earthquake,” I heard a man say once; to me, with no experience of earthquakes, the sensation was like that of an electric shock.

In man we can imagine the loss of the twitching power has had a twofold cause: first the hands, which, like the beak in birds, can reach to pretty well any part of the body, and, secondly, the custom of wearing clothes, which protect the skin and make the twitching unnecessary.

The twitching power survives only in the face, and is almost confined to the forehead: but even there it is, with its slow up-and-down motion, a poor faculty compared with the rapid shaking or trembling motion other mammals are capable of, which they are able to confine to the exact spot on which an insect has alighted. In a few persons the power extends over the scalp, and I have heard of a man who could cause his hat to fall off, not with shaking his head, but simply by working the muscles of his forehead and scalp. Altogether, we may say that the faculty is weakest in man--that he is at one end of the pole, and the mole is at the other. The mole exists in the earth, moving in and covered with the dust he creates in digging, and he no doubt frees himself from it by means of his twitching muscle a hundred times a day.

That this wonderful muscle can do anything more to increase his happiness I doubt, and this I say, because it is told in the sacred writings of the East that Buddha changed himself into a hare and jumped into a fire to roast himself to provide a meal for a hungry beggar, and that before jumping in, he--Buddha as a hare--shook himself three times so that none of the insects in his fur should perish with him.

I don’t believe it! My Ockley mole has proved to me that insect parasites cannot be got rid of in that way. The hare’s twitching muscle is not more powerful than that of the generality of animals. I have seen him make the water fly like a mist out of his fur, but the dog can do it nearly as well. In the mole the movement is more sustained and, I imagine, more rapid, yet the fleas must be able to keep their hold on him since we always find him much infested by them.